Hands-on Session 1: Following your nose, music for the minority, the 303 dance, and the transient nature of (wiki) fame

It’s important to note that when working with RDF tools and libraries are your friend. For example, most of the simple demo web user-facing tools are written using the Graphite and ARC PHP libraries.

However, to get an understanding of what’s going on “under the hood” we’re going to use some alternative tools. We’ve tried to find web-based interfaces for ease and speed of access during the tutorial, but we’ve also listed some alternatives you may be able to install on your own machine.

This is provided by a Linked Data encoding of Jamendo, provided by dbtune.org

you can leave “Input” as “Guess”

but make sure “Output” is “RDF/XML”

Your browser will now either display the XML serialised RDF, or offer to download it - if the latter, save the XML file and open it in your favourite text editor.

You should be looking at some RDF/XML describing the aspirationally-named group “Music for the Minority”

You’ll see some namespaces defined at the start, and referenced throughout by a namespace: prexix. Don’t worry about these too much (for now), but note the fairly intuitively labelled terms following the namespace prefixes.

You’ll be able to see some literal typed data (including some poor formatting), but you should also be able to follow your nose via some semantic relationships to further URIs. It may be helpful to sketch out the graph as you traverse it.

Once again, don’t worry too much about the exact “meaning” of these relationships - we’ll be talking about ontologies later. Just try browsing through this section of the web of data.

Try to cut and paste these linked URIs both directly into your web browser, for a human-readable representation, and into the “Input” field of Morph.

This is content negotiation at work

Not everything is RDF! But you should be able to follow links to find out more about:

note that non-human client can connect directly to the endpoint using the SPARQL protocol

When the Collection Builder “grounds” a collection it queries the Audio File repository with a simple query to find any audio files which encode the abstract recordings listed in the (ungrounded) collection: